A decade has passed since the Foo Fighters rose phoenix-like from the ashes
of Nirvana. Ten years and five albums on, mainman Dave Grohl and drummer
Taylor Hawkins invite Classic Rock to their Los Angeles studio to revisit the band's
past and look forward to their future.

It's been 10 years since Dave Grohl survived the hurricane
that was Nirvana, dusted himself off and fonned Foo
Fighters. What began as a modest, almost cathartic exercise
has become a monstrously successful group with a string of
hits like Learn To Fly, Everlong and Times Like These. Grohl
simply wanted to liberate songs he'd kept locked away while his life
was consumed drumming in what was then the world's most
pivotal band. But Grohl has the Midas touch. Everything he handles
turns to gold records. They line the walls of the vast studio complex
Foo Fighters have recently constructed in Northridge, a deeply
unfashionable suburb of Los Angeles best known as the epicentre
of the city's great 1994 earthquake.
Decked out in a sharp black suit, the ever-friendly Grohl gives the
more casually attired but equally upbeat drummer Taylor Hawkins
a congratulatory hug. It's the day after the group put the finishing
touches to their fifth and most ambitious record. In Your Honor is a
schizophrenic double CD guaranteed to disillusion all those who
thought they had the group neatly pegged as purveyors of tuneful,
ballsy pop rock. The first CD is a collection of the dirtiest, loudest,
most menacing tracks of their career. When recording the likes of
D.O.A., In Your Honor and Hell, the locals must have thought they
were experiencing delayed aftershocks. In stark contrast, the
second CD is an acoustic anthology of quiet, fragile restraint.
To mark their anniversary and the new record, Grohl and
Hawkins take us back over the turbulent history ofFoo Fighters, one
record at a time.

FOO FIGHTERS - 1995
After Nirvana, I wasn't really sure what to do," says
Grohl, who was 25 when Kurt Cobain's suicide
brought that group abruptly to an end. "I was asked to
join a couple of other bands as the drummer, but I just
couldn't imagine doing that because it would just
remind me of being in Nirvana; every time I sat down at a drum set, I
would think of that. And other people would think of that as well. I
thought, what do I do? Do I even play music any more? I don't know.
Maybe that was it. Maybe it's time to do something else. Maybe real life
starts now. Because at that point I had been touring in bands since I
was 18 and I'd seen the world and got to be in this huge band."
&nbsp As Grohl contemplated his next move, he was well aware that
anything he did was going to be overshadowed by his association with
Nirvana whose influence only grows with the passing years.
&nbsp "When I was young, someone played me the Klark Kent record that
Stewart Copeland had done. I thought how cool that he could make a
record and people can listen to it objectively because it wasn't Stewart
Copeland from The Police, it was Klark Kent. That's kind of what I
wanted to do. There were some songs I'd recorded in my friend's
studio while Nirvana was still a band and an independent label in
Detroit wanted to release something."
&nbsp It wasn't the first time Grohl's compositions had been the subject of
outside interest. In 1991 he'd released a 10 track cassette called Late on
the Washington-based Simple Machines label. Initially contractual
restrictions prevented him from releasing any more new material, but with the demise of Nirvana in April 1994, multi-instrumentalist Grohl
was free to pursue a solo career.
&nbsp He booked six days at Bob Lang's studio north of Seattle, used
earlier that year by Nirvana, and set about recording the batch of songs
he'd written over the past six years. "I was really prepared. I had
demoed the songs and I knew what the arrangements were. I knew
what I was going to do on the drums and I'd figured out all the guitar.
That would be the most time I had ever spent in the studio recording
stuff of my own. I just thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I
never intended for it to be a major releases. I started my own company,
Roswell Records, and I called it Foo Fighters because I wanted people
to think it was a band. I didn't want any names on it or pictures."
&nbsp Taking the name Foo Fighters from the term given to UFOs by
World War II pilots, Grohl ran off a few cassette copies. When one
reached the hands of a Seattle OJ friend, who played I'll Stick Around,
"people kind of freaked on it". It was a reaction not unlike the one
Grohl had when hearing his new songs in their full splendour. "I
remember that was the first time I ever listened to something I'd done
and thought: 'That sounds like a band. That's fucking rad.'"
&nbsp The reaction to the tape was swift. "I'd get calls from Virgin, RCA,
MCA, Columbia or Capitol or whatever." In the end Grohl signed with
Capitol after being courted by President Gary Gersh who, as an A&R
man with Geffen, had signed Nirvana.
&nbsp Recording all the instruments in the studio was one thing, but even
the talented Grohl couldn't play them all live. For that he would need a
band. After securing bass player Nate Mendel and drummer William
Goldsmith from the recently defunct Sunny Day Real Estate he gave a
tape to guitarist Pat Smear, a man who had also played with Nirvana.
"He said, 'God, this stuff is really poppy!'" squeals Grohl in his best
Smear impersonation. "I'm like: 'Really?' He goes: 'I love it.' 'Wow,
thanks. We're looking for a guitar player.' He's like: 'I'll do it.' I'm like:
'You will?' No shit, because he's like the coolest fucking guy in the
world. That guy was in The Germs. He was great in Nirvana, and I
thought he's way out of this league; this is just a stupid demo."
&nbsp With a band assembled they began rehearsing. But the role of
frontman was a new and uncomfortable one for Grohl: "Standing up
and singing a song with a guitar with shredding volume did not feel
natural. It still doesn't."
&nbsp He also found the experience of performing his own material in
distinct contrast to that of playing with Nirvana: "It's a different feeling
when you're singing words you've written and playing songs you've
written. It's so much more personal."
&nbsp When the Foo Fighters' self -tided debut album arrived on shelves in
July 1995, its cover depicted the band's name above a photograph of a
gun. Considering Grohl's former bandmate had shot himself to death
only 15 months earlier, the choice of cover image might appear to
some to be tactless. "Yeah, people kind of freaked out on that," admits
Grohl, whose love of sci-fi had led him to choose the picture of the
Buck Rogers toy gun. "You know, honestly, that never came to mind
once. Obviously it didn't, because if I thought people would associate
that with that, I would never have done it."
&nbsp The cover aside, reaction to the album was positive. It reached
number 23 in the Billboard chart. The Foo Fighters had arrived.

THE COLOUR AND THE SHAPE - 1997
It was almost as if Foo Fighters had
evolved accidentally but now, as a fully
fledged group with a hit record and tour
behind them, it was clear the approach to
the second album would be different.
"Going into making The Colour And The Shape I knew it had
to be good," says Grohl. "It couldn't be a basement demo.
It couldn't be that second raw album that most people
were doing at the time."
&nbsp Grohl, though, was still uncertain about exactly what it
was he'd created. "The foundation of the band was that
demo tape recorded by one person and at times it could
feel flimsy. It would make you question: Are we a band? Or
'How does this work?'
&nbsp So we immediately started writing new songs like My
Hero, Enough Space and My Poor Brain. We hired Gil Norton
to produce. He'd produced some of our favourite records:
Pixies and Echo & The Bunnymen, stuff like that. Gil is
awesome in that he fucking wrings you out. He wants
every last drop of performance and song. It was intense. I
learnt more from that guy than anyone."
&nbsp But by the time they'd nearly completed the album, it
had become obvious all was not well. "We'd finished like
12 songs," recalls Grohl. "We'd recorded Monkey Wrench,
Wind Up, Doll and My Poor Brain and everyone knew that it
wasn't really happening. William, our drummer, wasn't
really gelling. It didn't sound powerful. It just didn't sound
how I'd imagined it to sound."
&nbsp The group took a Christmas break, during which Grohl
went into a friend's studio and started recording new
material, playing drums himself. He played the songs to
Norton: "He's like: 'Those are good. I like those'. So I started
recording newer songs, playing the drums, playing the
guitar and William was bumming out. That turned into a
breakdown and then I realised he wasn't coming back, so I
recorded all the drums on the record myself. It was basically
Pat, Nate and I for that album. We did it pretty quickly. We
re-recorded the record in about four weeks. When we were
done, I knew we had a fucking great album."
&nbsp In addition to the personal differences within the
group, Grohl was also in the midst of domestic upheaval.
"Oh, I was getting a divorce too," he adds nonchalantly.
"You know what's funny? People come up to me - it's
usually men - and say: 'Man, that album, it helped me
through my divorce'. I'm like: 'Really? It caused mine.'"
&nbsp If contentment is artistic death, then at least Grohl's
woes were having a positive influence on the music. "I was
living out of my duffel bag on this cat piss-stained mattress
in my friend's back room with 12 people in the house. It
was fucking awful. Made for a good record though."

THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE -1999
For two whole weeks Foo Fighters were a
quartet again. Alanis Morissette's drummer
Taylor Hawkins had joined the group but,
three days before they were to head out
on tour, "Pat said: 'Guys I have to quit',"
recalls Grohl, the sense of shock still palpable. "I'm like,
what the fuck? What next?"
&nbsp "That was a splintered fucking band at that
point," Hawkins reflects of his first days with the group.
"It really was," concurs Grohl. "The band was just
holding on by our fingertips this whole time."
Grohl convinced Smear to stay on until he found a
replacement in his old friend Franz Stahl, guitarist with
hardcore band Scream who Grohl had played with prior
to Nirvana.
&nbsp After the tour, Grohl was finding the Los Angeles
lifestyle too distracting. "We had the bachelor pad in
Laurel Canyon. We would just go drag the Sunset Strip
and bring it back to the house."
&nbsp Returning to the more tranquil pastures of his Virginia
roots, he built a studio in the basement of his house. They
extricated themselves from their record contract when Gersh left Capitol, and became a three-piece again. "It
didn't work out with Franz," Grohl states succinctly. The
Foos brought in producer Adam Kasper and set to work.
&nbsp "It was so great," smiles Grohl. "We were in a basement
in Virginia with sleeping bags nailed to the wall. There's
no record company, there's no suits knocking on the
door, there's no one telling you what's good or bad. It was
four months of the most mellow recording."
&nbsp The relaxed conditions were reflected in the music
which was softer than anything they'd produced to that
point. "It's easy to fucking stomp on a distortion pedal
and make a chorus blow up," explains Grohl. "That's easy.
It's easy to turn up to 10 and scream your balls off. What's
not easy is to write a song that's a mid-level linear
dynamic that moves from beginning to end with melody.
&nbsp "So that was the idea with a lot of that record, whether
it was Learn To Fly, Ain't It The Life, Gimme Stitches or Next Year.
We were more focused on melody and songwriting, and it
took a lot of people off guard. A lot of people thought Foo
Fighters were selling out or going soft. It was more about
getting into the music and writing. That album opened up
doors for us to make anything possible."

ONE BY ONE - 2002
"The making of that album was a fiasco,"
says Grohl bluntly. "We spent four
months and nearly a million bucks
recording that record and we threw it
away. We just fucking scrapped the whole
thing. It was not good enough."
&nbsp There were a number of factors which contributed to
them dumping an album for the second time. One was
Hawkins's increasing drug use, which culminated in him
overdosing during a trip to London.
&nbsp "After that I started getting my shit together," says
Hawkins. "I wanted to get over that hurdle and start
working. I think we all wanted to start working, but in
hindsight we jumped into it a little quick."
&nbsp "That's exactly what happened," agrees Grohl.
When the band - which now included ex-No Use For A
Name guitarist Chris Shiflett - did get to work, it was with
the express desire to adopt a more meticulous approach
than they'd used on the previous album. "For One By One I
thought: Okay we've got to make this sound fucking
perfect," says Grohl. "So we went in, and ultimately what
happened was we sucked a lot of the life out of the songs.
It wasn't inspired. I'd listen back to rough mixes and think
this sounds like another band playing our songs. I
remember looking at the calendar of the promo tour and
imagining having to do interviews for an album that I
wasn't 100 per cent convinced of. I thought: 'I can't do
that. I cannot go out and lie. I just can't fucking do it.'"
&nbsp In addition to his day job with Foo Fighters, Grohl had
been moonlighting with Queens Of The Stone Age,
playing drums on their Songs For Their Deaf album. Given
the choice of touring with Queens or promoting an
inferior Foo's album, he made a tough decision. "I just
thought: 'No that can't come out. It's not good enough.
We need to take a break. I'm going to go do this thing which
is inspiring me'. It felt great, but within three months, I
started missing the guys and the music. So I came back
and we thought we'd just go back into the basement with
Nick [Raskulinecz] and start demoing."
&nbsp "Dave came to my house one day and we did a couple
of demos," says Hawkins. "One of the songs he had written
was Times Like These, which was kind of about the band
breaking up and remembering why we're doing it and all
that stuff. Then we did Low. It felt good. So we're like, let's
just go back to your pad in DC and record those tunes."
&nbsp Starting at 11 o'clock one night, Dave and Taylor rattled
off three songs. For Grohl, the magic had returned. "That
feeling was back. You could hear it. And that's what was
missing from the first time. It was like: 'Holy shit, are we
making a record right now?"' They were. And two weeks
later, after Nate and Chris had added their parts, they had.

IN YOUR HONOUR - 2005
The tour for One By One had elevated Foo
Fighters to a new level. "We had finally
established ourselves to the point where I
thought we can play an hour-and-a-half
set and make 50,000 people sing all the
words. That's fucking cool." As proud as Grohl was, it also
served to make him question the band's next move.
&nbsp "We toured so much for the last record and it was such
a fucking blast, but it was gruelling. I'm 36 now and I've
been doing it for 18 years and I thought: 'Is this what I'm
supposed to do with the rest of my life? I don't know.
Maybe it's time to have the band take another left turn.'"
&nbsp Inspired by Tom Petty's solo work on She's The One,
Grohl considered doing a soundtrack. "So I started
demoing all this acoustic music with that in mind. After
an hour or two of listening to it, I thought why can't this
be a Foo Fighters record? Maybe we should do this kick-
ass mellow acoustic record. So I thought maybe that's
what we should do. And then I thought no, I have to have
loud rock music in my life somewhere." There was also a
health issue to consider, according to Hawkins: "Two
years of acoustic touring and we might be really fat."
&nbsp Faced with reconciling an acoustic album with Grohl's
need to have "loud rock" in his life, the Foos frontman came
up with a solution. "Why not make two CDs?" he thought.
&nbsp Why not indeed? Nine years and four albums had given
Grohl the confidence and licence to do whatever he
wanted. "I eventually want it to get to the point where
when people ask me what kind of band I'm in, I say: 'I just
play music'. It's not one specific genre of music, it's not
one specific style. I'm just a musician. I can play all these
different instruments, I can write a bossa nova, I can write
a thrash tune. It's such an incredible freedom. That's the
point of this album."
&nbsp Nine months in creation, In Your Honor is an assured
work of musical chiaroscuro and one of which Grohl is duly
proud. "It's exactly what I imagined it to be and it sounds
better than I hoped. It's my shining achievement of my life."
&nbsp It would have been easy for Grohl to rest on his Nirvana
laurels. He could have dined out musically on that
connection forever, but he prefers to look ahead. Foo
Fighters are the future. It's why he has the band's initials
branded on the back of his neck. In Your Honor has
solidified that feeling. "It's the first time I've ever imagined
10 more years of being in this band."
&nbsp As he reflects on the turbulent and triumphant career
of Foo Fighters, the humble Grohl allows himself a rare
moment of pride. "Going from the demo tape that took
six days to record to what it's become, it's like having your
child grow up to be the head of the U;N. It's unbelievable."
&nbsp Move over, Kofi Annan, the Foo Fighters are coming.